For 33 years, I’ve been teaching as an adjunct instructor at one university or another. Different departments, different academic disciplines, different courses – my ego is large and my resume sufficiently murky.

The only time I ever turned down an academic gig was when an economics department asked me to teach a few undergraduate classes. I imagine that I could have danced my way through a few low-level macroeconomic classes, but I feared that I might ruin the lives of the budding economists unlucky enough to be trapped in my classroom.

The econometricians have sort of taken over economics; at best, it is a discipline full of formulas and equations and funny charts and curves and things that at one time you could use as a tool to help you along, but now, the math geeks are in charge. I wasn’t up to the task.

The Boston Globe “Ideas” section offered up a little Harvard Business Review blog chat recently that suggested economists were unusually influential these days, because they seemingly reach clear-headed, reasonable conclusions – supported by research that is so complex that no can actually evaluate it.

As one blogger put it: “ most bloggers and journalists are cowed by all those equations into simply assuming that it all stands up somehow.”

That might be a little bit harsh. I remember a great paper in the New England Economic Review back in 1996 by a senior economist at the Boston Fed on the status of laid-off workers. I was actually reassured by the promise that “The Cox proportional hazards model was used to estimate the coefficients, which represent the relative likelihood of finding employment in any given time period, for a unit increase in the value of the explanatory variable.”

William Salant, who was a clever data guru for the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington, once vowed to implement a two-noun limit on economists, so that, according to the old New York Times economics columnist Leonard Silk, the economists could no longer write five-noun monstrosities such as “terminal traffic control program category.”

It Adds Up To Joy

All economists are not necessarily subject to the same degrees of mental illness. Jonathan Gruber, a professor of economics at MIT, aware that he was writing for non-Martians, as opposed to other economists, wrote a clear and accurate piece applying economic analysis to ObamaCare last September for the Boston Globe that still stands up well today.

For some economists, the trick to being popular is to research stuff that is so much fun that even the econometricians can’t find a way to complicate it. Benjamin Edelman of the Harvard Business School, writing in The Journal of Economic Perspectives, noted that very religious people in very religious states tended to subscribe to more porn sites than other Americans did. Praise the Lord and pass the marginal propensity to consume dirty stuff.

But don’t let the guys try to fool you. For every study of porn sites, there will inevitably be the economist-speak reality that the marginal physical product of an input is the increase in output that results from a one-unit increase in the use of the input, holding the amounts of all other inputs constant.

If you tell an economist that you don’t care about such stuff, he will cite your indifference as an excuse to give you yet another lecture about production indifference curves. There’s really no escaping the nightmare. The total fixed cost curve is always horizontal – there’s nothing you can do.

Susan Lee, an economist and senior editor for Forbes magazine, crafted a little book in the 1980s designed to provide “everything you need to know in plain English” about economics. She conceded that economics was “not always easy to figure,” and was full of buzzwords and lingo.

I’m one of those soft-headed types that would like to see economics dragged back to the “liberal arts” side of the academic house – one step removed from English literature. But that wouldn’t be right.

You need some math and formulas and demand curves and other such stuff to explain the excess capacity theorem, which suggests that Cohen would be a wealthy man, if there weren’t so many damn columnists available.